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Sunday, November 27, 2022

2022-11-27

 *** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Economic and Market Fare:


As global central banks aggressively hike interest rates in response to inflation, the world faces a recession in 2023 and what could be financial crises in emerging markets and developing economies. 

Institute of International Finance's chief economist Robin Brooks tweeted a "global recession in 2023" is the best case. ....



.................. In summary, the theme of 2023 will be deflation, as frugality is already coming back into style with a vengeance for the middle class. Meanwhile, investor FOMO is about to explode with extreme dislocation. 

This past week's Fed minutes confirm that December rate hike is a lock, which means 2022 will see the EXACT same level of Fed rate hikes that took place between 2003-2006. The last time the Fed imploded the middle class.


***** Rearguard Battle

The award of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Ben Bernanke last month unleashed a wave of indignation among those who view the former chair of the Federal Reserve as the epitome of unoriginal establishment thinking. Bernanke received the prize for work demonstrating that bank runs were possible and that they could impact real economic activity. Both of those things had been perfectly obvious since at least the 1930s. But the Keynesian models that the economics profession built during the post-war era were unable to account for such events, having no real explanation for the volatile dynamics of debt and finance.

This aporia became more obvious when the era of ‘fiscal dominance’ came to an end and financial instability made a comeback from the second half of the 1960s, challenging the Keynesian paradigm and lending credibility to rival strands of thought. Rational expectations theorists underscored the inherent futility of government attempts to interfere with the inner workings of the market, while Milton Friedman’s monetarism fostered the notion that Keynesian inflationism was responsible for the corruption of America’s monetary standard.

Bernanke and other New Keynesians didn’t buy the idea that the problems of the present could be solved by returning to a pure free market. Yet the shallowness of their take on the problem of capitalism’s instability was evident in the subsequent evolution of Bernanke’s work into a framework for inflation targeting and monetary fine-tuning that looked with suspicion on any attempts to manage stock markets or asset prices. In 2004, while serving on the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, he brought the notion of ‘the Great Moderation’ into mainstream circulation, expressing his conviction that through rule-driven fine-tuning, the Federal Reserve would be able to ensure stable, non-inflationary growth. Above all, Bernanke maintained the illusion that, with the right minds at the helm of the economy, money could be the thing of neoclassical fantasy – neutral, stable, unobtrusive. As his memoir makes clear, this fully neoliberalized Keynesianism comfortably survived Bernanke’s own involvement in the enormous rescue operations that followed the near-collapse of the American financial system in 2007-08. ...............

Central to Blinder’s old-fashioned Keynesian project is the famous ‘Phillips curve’, which depicts an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment. That curve occupied a pivotal but paradoxical place in post-war Keynesian thought. On the one hand, it formalized an unfortunate existential condition: the inevitable trade-off between the need to ensure stable money and the wish to make sure that everyone who wants a decent job has one. On the other hand, it was within this trade-off that Keynesians always identified a certain political agency: we may not like the fact that the trade-off exists, but we do have a choice about how to strike the balance – there is always something policymakers can do.

This was the prized possession of post-war Keynesianism that monetarists and rational expectations theorists sought to undermine. Friedman drew the Phillips curve as a straight vertical line, indicating that there is a non-negotiable, natural rate of unemployment and that attempts to interfere with it will inevitably backfire. Notwithstanding his attempts to ‘relegate my personal political views to second or third fiddle’, the clear purpose of Blinder’s book is to rescue the logic of the Phillips curve from the clutches of neoliberal reaction. For him, ‘being a Keynesian sometimes means worrying more about unemployment than about inflation’ – caring more about the welfare of those who need to sell their labour than the income streams of the rentier. That’s a nice sentiment, but what does it amount to? ........

Blinder’s most conspicuous lacuna is the same as Bernanke’s: an understanding of financial instability as an active force in the making of history. In their world, banks are institutions that take deposits and channel them into longer-term loans – neutral intermediators that work to even out financial flows that might otherwise not be well-matched, a prime example of the market solving its own problems. This ignores the possibility that the creation of money and credit might be tied up with uncertainty and volatility in a way that is systemic rather than accidental. It occludes the fact that financial institutions produce volatility in the course of their normal operations. Instability – loss of liquidity, non-payment, outright failure – is endemic, not exceptional.

Without an understanding of finance as a real force, the drama of the 1970s is impossible to comprehend. .......

Beneath the superficial narrative of non-inflationary growth is a story of scarce liquidity here and abundant liquidity there, volatile asset prices, bankruptcies, bailouts for some and austerity for others. Yet, as A Monetary History of the United States shows, none of this is explicable from a New Keynesian perspective. ........

Bernanke’s trajectory suggests that when Keynesian concerns with economic instability are embraced by establishment interests and thinkers, they are likely to be used ‘to give life to rentiers rather than to abet their euthanasia’, as Hyman Minsky put it. That is the essence of the fully neoliberalized Keynesianism that Blinder fails to reckon with. It entails a commitment to stabilization as the overriding imperative of economic policymaking, which, rather than being constrained by traditional, social-democratic interpretations of Keynes, instead flexibly adapts his ideas to the requirements of an asset-driven economic system. ........


Pettis: Bad Trade

“China will compete for some low-wage jobs with Americans,” lectured Nobel laureate Robert Solow from the White House podium, amidst the U.S. debate over China’s ascension to the World Trade Organization. “And their market will provide jobs for higher wage, more skilled people. And that’s a bargain for us.” More than 20 years later, economists and policymakers are still searching for that bargain. Belatedly, they are discovering that whether or not trade benefits the global economy or any particular nation depends, like most things in economics, on the specific underlying economic conditions.

........................ The problem is not free trade per se. The problem is a system in which trade depresses wages rather than raises productivity. The United States should take the lead in reforming this very unbalanced global trade regime, not by turning against trade but rather by eliminating the conditions that allow grossly unbalanced trade. Either Washington should pioneer new trade agreements that directly restrict the ability of countries to run large and persistent surpluses, much as John Maynard Keynes proposed during the Bretton Woods conference, or it should unilaterally refuse to continue playing its role of absorber of last resort of global excess savings and instead force its own trade and capital flows into balance.

When trade between countries directly boosts production and indirectly boosts demand, the global economy is better off. When it directly constrains demand and so indirectly constrains production, not only is the global economy worse off, but countries like the United States bear an especially heavy cost to keep the system afloat. The purpose of international trade should be to maximize overall productivity and, with it, to increase welfare. It should not allow individual countries to maximize domestic production at the expense of their trading partners.


A 'multifaceted' economic crisis threatens









High prices seem to have started to weigh on diesel demand in the United States, where distillate inventories – comprising diesel and heating oil – have been slowly rising over the past few weeks.    American distillate inventories are still below the five-year average, but the gap in stocks compared to previous years has slowly started to narrow, suggesting that high prices are hitting demand, while encouraging more refinery output thanks to solid refining margins.


Global property’s goody-two-shoes are in trouble

Ahousing crash sent the global economy into recession between 2007 and 2009. But three countries—Australia, Canada and Sweden—cruised through the commotion. Even as property prices plummeted elsewhere, all three recorded double-digit growth. Some of this was good fortune. A commodities boom propped up the economies of Australia and Canada, for instance. But smart policy helped. Each country was held up as a shining example to other crisis-stricken places, their officials effusively praised. ...



On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced that it will once again extend its pause on federal student loan payments. According to Department of Education, the pause, which was set to expire in December, could now be pushed back as far as the end of August 2023.


A SYSTEM UNRAVELS

INTRODUCTION

As everyone surely knows by now, the global economy has entered a recession which is likely to be both severe and protracted. For the most part, governments and central bankers are concentrating on the task of trying to tame inflation.

Their critics tend to argue for more expansionary fiscal and monetary policies, contending that stimulus could soften or shorten the recession. They claim, in defiance both of experience and of logic, that expansionary monetary policies needn’t contradict the effort to bring inflation under control.

Where almost everybody is in agreement is that, however long it takes, the recession will end. But there’s a striking absence of explanations for how or why growth is supposed to resume. The fall-back position is no more than an assumption – a recovery will arrive for no better reason than that all previous economic downturns have been followed by rebounds.

The underlying presumption here is cyclicality, a process accepted as routine, not just by policy-makers and central bankers, but by investors, business leaders and the general public alike. It is well understood that the Big Numbers – like economic output, and the aggregate value of the markets – oscillate in sine-wave patterns around central trends.

It’s further assumed that these secular trends are always positive – each recovery exceeds the preceding recession, and each market rebound more than cancels out the latest dip.

This latter assumption has reached the point of invalidation. What economies and markets are now experiencing is trend-inflexion. Cyclicality may indeed continue but, from here on, it will do so around downwards-inflected trends. This process of reversal can only be managed if it is recognized. ....................



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

“Crowds? I see nothing. I’m surprised,” retail worker Jeremy Pritchett told FOX 2. “Normally, it’s wrapped all the way around the building. Today: no one.” 
That’s the typical ground report from areas all over the country. No one, literally almost no one, is doing any holiday shopping and the traditional Black Friday rush to get deals and discounts just didn’t happen. Financial media are scratching their puzzlers, perplexed with furrowed brows. Interestingly, almost every financial media outlet is using the same Retail Federation talking point about anticipating an 8% increase in holiday sales this year. Apparently, pretenses must be maintained. Meanwhile, news crews and camera crews are having a desperate time finding any holiday shopping to use as background footage for the claims that sales are strong. “Look, over there. There’s a person buying something. Oh, wait, no, that’s just an employee dusting the empty cash register.” At a certain point, one would have to believe reality would run head-first into the mass delusional pretending. Maybe this holiday season will be it, maybe not.


Doomberg: Much like The Desert Inn, Wall Street is designed to separate punters from their capital. As the Everything Bubble™ continues to deflate, legions of gamblers find themselves wishing they left the casino much earlier, working their way through the stages of grief, and no longer ridiculing those who avoided the tables altogether on the way up.


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Charts: 
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Bubble Fare:

The FTX collapse was perhaps the single biggest risk management failure in the history of finance. Today, we provide a crash course in basic risk and liquidity metrics which should be required reading for anyone managing crypto investments.

We’ve seen enough incidents over the last few months, let alone years, to conclude there is a complete lack of adequate risk management in crypto. Throughout the Terra collapse, crypto credit crisis, and spectacular implosion of FTX we have collectively witnessed the industry’s largest (and most opaque) firms become insolvent in an instant. 

This begs the question: where were the basic financial risk controls that are mandatory in any other industry? 

A neglect of proper risk and liquidity management in a market as volatile as crypto has proven to be a death sentence for any business or investor. Today, we will demonstrate why risk metrics such as VaR and expected shortfall, alongside CeFi and DeFi liquidity metrics, are an absolute necessity for any crypto firm in a post-FTX world ......


The collapse of FTX has set off a chain reaction that threatens to topple one of crypto’s oldest and most respected institutions.

.... If Genesis were to fold, it would deliver another gut-punch to an industry already reeling from the fall of FTX, one of its most highly regarded companies. If an institution the size and standing of Genesis is vulnerable, can trust be placed in the stability of any crypto firm? Yes, the industry is expected to survive the ordeal, but the days of minimal oversight, generous funding, and rapid expansion are over.

The impact from the potential fall of Genesis should not be underestimated. It might not be as well known as FTX and other exchanges, but it’s crucial to the day-to-day operations of the crypto world. In 2021 alone, the company issued $131 billion in loans and set up $116.5 billion in trades; the Financial Times has described it as the Goldman Sachs of crypto. To fund these loans, Genesis borrows from individuals and institutions that own large quantities of coins, also known as whales, who receive a cut of profits in return.  ...........



Mistakes become mistakes only in hindsight. The mistake I made, for example, in believing in the transitory aspect of inflation stems largely from not anticipating the extended nature of the global supply issue, sure, not helped by the war in Ukraine. I also made a mistake not investing in crypto.

Did Fed forecasters really make the same mistake on inflation? I am not sure. Regardless of what they said in public, a big driver in their decision-making process must have been the recency bias: after more than a decade of unsuccessfully grappling with disinflation, the right risk-return strategy was ‘to give inflation a chance’. And now the Fed is onto a different ‘recency bias’: having gone through the painful experience of the 1970s, the right strategy for them is to kill inflation at all costs.

That’s how decisions are made in the policy world: not based on actual forecasting outcomes but on protecting awful tail events from ever happening again. To a certain extent that’s how we also make decisions about things which concern us personally, even though we employ more of a barbel strategy: long both tails of the distribution tree.

Take crypto and the recent developments as an example. See this story. I would say, no, the majority of the people who invested in crypto were not stupid. Most were actually quite rational but lazy. Others, though, were irresponsible. 

Private investors who invested a small single digit % of their wealth in crypto were logically simply playing the lottery ticket odds. VCs, which also invested a small % of their assets in crypto entities, were also, but they were lazy to do the proper due diligence.

In both cases, the decision-making process was mostly driven by aiming to hit the right-hand side (positive) tail-risk outcome. The risk-return was skewed to do that. Strictly speaking for the former that was the right decision; the latter should have done the work though. Either way, there was no risk in this case of ever landing on the left side of the distribution tree.

And then there is the third group, the pension funds, and the likes, who were simply irresponsible – they had no business investing in crypto. I think that is where one should search for accountability. ...



The crypto ecosystem has grown massively in the last three years. Many of those participating in it have made life-changing amounts of money - on paper, or perhaps more accurately on computer. But  the problem with paper gains is that they tend to evaporate like the morning mist when the market turns. The crypto market turned towards the end of 2021 and is now firmly in bear territory. Bitcoin has fallen from above $60,000 in November 2021 to barely $16,000 now. For anyone who bought Bitcoin near the top, that is a mammoth real loss. And even though it is not a real loss for people who bought Bitcoin in the bear market of 2018 and have HODLed for years, it is still a mammoth paper loss. No-one likes to see an unrealised financial gain wiped out by the markets before they can claim it. 

Unsurprisingly, crypto people have been selling up in droves. For crypto investors to cash out their extraordinary gains, there must be real money in the system - dollars, euros, yen, pounds. But the crypto system, unlike the traditional finance system, is unable to create real money. It can create tokens that represent dollars, euros, yen etc, but these aren't accepted for real-world transactions such as purchasing condos in the Bahamas. So the crypto system needs inflows of real money. The more it grows, the more real money it must attract. 

 Much of the real money that has gone into the crypto ecosystem in the last three years has come from institutional investors. But as any bank will tell you, institutional money is not the most stable form of funding. Professional investors are a fickle bunch: they'll withdraw their money in a flash if they see a better profit opportunity, and they run at the first sign of trouble. For stable funding, what you really need is retail deposits. So platforms such as FTX specifically targeted retail customers, offering higher-yielding alternatives to bank accounts, complete with online payment facilities and debit cards, and encouraging retail customers to have their wages paid directly into accounts on the platform .......

Why did it take FDIC so long to act? Partly, I suspect, because crypto wasn't seen as posing a serious risk to the mainstream financial system. And perhaps also because crypto has never been eligible for FDIC insurance, so there was no particular reason for FDIC to take an interest in it. Whatever the reason, FDIC did not act until after Voyager's failure revealed systematic mis-selling of FDIC insurance to retail customers.  

Just as FDIC was starting to clamp down on mis-selling of FDIC insurance by crypto companies, FTX jumped on the FDIC insurance scam bandwagon. .....

FTX is the latest in a very long line of crypto platforms that have gone down taking their depositors' money with them. It will probably not be the last. You'd think, given how much money retail depositors have already lost and are still to lose, that the remaining platforms would refrain from offering obviously unsustainable returns. But no. ......

The crypto system's need to persudade more and more people to part with their savings to maintain the ponzi makes false promises and mis-selling endemic. Nor has a swathe of high-profile failures, culminating in the recent collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's empire, in any way deterred the survivors. Indeed it makes it even more imperative that they attract new deposits. If they don't, the whole thing will implode. 

But implode it will, eventually. Because ponzis always do. 



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

The only way to lessen risk altogether would be to reduce substantially society’s scale of energy and materials usage


...... Many companies are making bold promises to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases to zero. According to Accenture, around one-third of the world’s 2,000 biggest firms by revenue now have publicly stated net-zero goals. Of those, however, 93% have no chance of achieving their targets without doing much more than they are at the moment. Few businesses lay out credible investment plans or specify milestones against which progress can be judged.

Please read that again. 93% have no chance of achieving their targets.

In order to curb such “dishonest climate accounting”, the report urges companies to make public disclosures of their progress towards decarbonisation using verified and comparable data. It implores regulators to make these disclosures mandatory. In addition, the authors say, firms should not claim to be net-zero while investing in new fossil-fuel supplies (which puts many investment funds in a bind) nor rely on reporting the intensity of emissions (per unit of output) rather than their absolute volume. And organisations making green claims must not simultaneously lobby against climate policies.

All very bracing, and perfectly sensible. Will business take it to heart? The UN has no authority to enforce any of the recommendations. The idea that increased scrutiny will inevitably lead to better behaviour remains untested. It is all too easy to imagine that it might instead lead to what you might call green-hushing. ....

A potent cocktail of cheap money and sanctimony fuelled a boom in ESG investing, during which asset managers and bankers pitched themselves as environmental saviours. A fable it is.  ......



The rise in lithium battery use is causing an increase in both the frequency and severity of ship fires, according to a report by Allianz.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of insurance claims point both to climate change and earnest efforts by shipping to address it.



Sci Fare:


Abstract
Infection with the etiological agent of COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, appears capable of impacting cognition, which some patients with Post-acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC). To evaluate neuro-pathophysiological consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection, we examine transcriptional and cellular signatures in the Broadman area 9 (BA9) of the frontal cortex and the hippocampal formation (HF) in SARS-CoV-2, Alzheimers disease (AD) and SARS-CoV-2 infected AD individuals, compared to age- and gender-matched neurological cases. Here we show similar alterations of neuroinflammation and blood-brain barrier integrity in SARS-CoV-2, AD, and SARS-CoV-2 infected AD individuals. ...





Other Fare:







Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”


Regular [Everyday Life] Fare:


.... It's been a while since my last rant on humanity, so here goes. I am reading two books at the same time right now, but I'm only part way through both of them. One is "Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind" by Yuval Noah Harari, and the other is "The Myth of Normal" by Gabor Mate. These are clearly totally separate books by different authors and yet they have much in common. The former book "Sapiens" explains how our current constantly reinvented way of life is merely a blink of an eye in the timeline of human civilization. And the second book explains that we have normalized all of modern society's anti-social behaviours as "normal", which is leading to wholesale mental health meltdown. Both books continually highlight the primary theme that our newfound transactional corporate society is nothing like how human beings lived in the past. As predicted over fifty years ago in "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler:
"Society experiences an increasing number of changes with an increasing rapidity, while people are losing the familiarity that old institutions (religion, family, national identity, profession) once provided"
The post-industrial society will be marked by a transient culture where everything ranging from goods to human relationships will be temporary

So it is that we live in a disintegrating society beset with rampant overdoses aka. suicides, mass shootings, economic and environmental collapse, and political dysfunction. And yet not one media pundit will draw a straight line from all of that disintegration back to the globalized corporate empire which is using people up at an accelerating pace. The term "myth of normal" is exactly how I would describe this entire globalized delusion, not only at the mental health level but at the macro economic level as well. We have normalized the disintegration of the middle class, which has culminated in this pandemic wealth transfer from the middle class to the ultra wealthy. During the pandemic it was the doubling of the Fed balance sheet to $9 trillion that created the colossal asset bubble, driving record wealth inequality. Interest rates were only lowered 1.5%, a mere 1/3rd of the decrease in 2008. And yet we are to believe that 0% for SEVEN years post-2008 caused 1% inflation, and 0% for two years post-2020 caused 9% high inflation. Sure. ......

...... One of the insights from "Sapiens" is that human beings are the only species that are capable of what the author calls "imagined realities". He asserts that imagined realities are what creates and sustains large scale organizations and empires - because they bring together millions of disparate people under a set of shared beliefs, be those real or imagined. Think religions and nation states.

For some long time readers, the term "imagined realities" is very familiar, because it's the EXACT SAME term hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry used in December 2014 to describe the post-2008 monetary Disneyland. He asserted that quantitative easing could temporarily conjure the illusion of economic recovery in markets. But that inevitably the policy would be overused until markets and the economy exploded at the same time:

"The worse the reality of the economy becomes, the more we take on the reflexive belief in further and dramatic monetary expansion and the more attractive the stock market looks" ........



The Prado and the Reina Sofia museums were closed to the public for the two-day NATO summit held in Madrid in the last week of June. A day before the summit, at the Sophia, in front of Picasso’s Guernica, Extinction Rebellion, and Fridays for Future staged a die-in. Five thousand NATO delegates had descended upon Madrid. They were doubled by a security entourage numbering ten thousand. That same week the US Supreme Court had rescinded the reproductive rights of women, clamped down on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and eased the right to carry concealed weapons in the United States. Yet the chaos that America’s legal machine had unleashed, was temporarily set aside by Biden’s team at the Madrid summit, replaced by revivified notions of hegemonic stability. 

In NATO’s hierarchy, the US occupies the role of supreme commander. NATO’s Strategic Concept, its vision statement, explicitly affirms America’s nuclear capability as the crux of North Atlantic security 1 . Following Russia’s war on Ukraine, NATO’s newly updated policy manifesto strikes out its planned strategic partnership with Russia in 2010 to an aggressive stance against the Eurasian power. A more constant feature of the Strategic Concept over the decades is the reminder that if one NATO member is attacked, Article 5 may be invoked, allowing the alliance to engage in retaliatory attack. Ukraine’s EU membership may take years but over a hundred thousand US troops are now stationed in Europe. Since January, this number has increased by twenty thousand. 

America’s largest military expansion in Europe since the Cold War—is accompanied by its refueling of Europe. US liquified natural gas now accounts for almost half of European LNG imports, a stunning reversal from just last year when US LNG was shunned by Europe out of ESG concerns. Much to the chagrin of climate activists, the EU parliament has voted to include gas, a fossil fuel, in its taxonomy of sustainable energy. Securing its largest foreign market while rewriting the rules (ESG taxonomies) of the game, the foreign policy hawks in the Biden administration have pulled off a remarkable coup d’état for the hydro-carbon dollar. 

Henry Kissinger recently remarked: ‘A curious aspect of this war it that it almost looks like World War I.’ 2 A common myth propagated by economists, is that in breaking down international trade and investment, wars interrupt globalization. Adam Tooze and Ted Fertik 3 complicate this narrative. They argue that World War I activated the networks of 19th century globalization and violently realigned them. The war in Ukraine has irrevocably altered the global landscape.  .........

.......... Amidst the many uncertainties of a weaponized world economic order, what is clear is that the energy transition will involve significant macroeconomic instability and inequality, the likes of which we haven’t encountered before. It is also clear that much of the collateral damage will be borne by the periphery. ...






Unsustainability / Climate Fare:


Years ago, James Schlesinger noted that human beings have only two operational modes: complacency and panic. It is an observation that rings true and that we can generalize in terms of groups: some humans are catastrophists, and some are cornucopians. Much of the current debate is about whether the economy can continue growing, as it has been doing for a few centuries, or it is condemned to start a decline that could be very rapid (the "Seneca Cliff"). 

I tend to side with the catastrophists, to the point that I created the term "Seneca Effect" or "Seneca Cliff" to define the rapid decline that comes after growth stops. Indeed, catastrophes are a common occurrence in human history, but it is also true that sometimes (rarely) a catastrophic decline can be reversed: I termed this effect the "Seneca Rebound." ........

............ Is tight oil going to peak again and, this time, forever? We cannot say. We can only say that the American Empire is following the ebb and flow of the resources that make it exist. Such is the power of energy, and empires are but slaves to the forces that govern the universe! 



... The book’s message is stark and clear.  Capitalism’s rapacious drive for profit is destroying the planet and only “degrowth” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth.  Humans need to find a “new way of living”, and that means replacing capitalism.

Saito is deeply sceptical of some widely accepted strategies for tackling the climate emergency. “In my book, I start a sentence by describing sustainable development goals [SDGs] as the new opium of the masses,” he said in reference to Marx’s view of religion. “Buying eco bags and bottles without changing anything about the economic system … SDGs mask the systemic problem and reduce everything to the responsibility of the individual, while obscuring the responsibility of corporations and politicians.”

He continues: “We face a very difficult situation: the pandemic, poverty, climate change, the war in Ukraine, inflation … it is impossible to imagine a future in which we can grow the economy and at the same time live in a sustainable manner without fundamentally changing anything about our way of life. .....



How often do you think of schizophrenia? Are you aware that most of Western society suffers from collective schizophrenia? I've mentioned wetiko in this space often, because of the implications it has with modern civilization. For those unfamiliar with wetiko, please see this article. Most people completely ignore the unsustainability of civilization, brought about by denial of reality. It is this collective denial which also allows us to completely ignore the real world that we live in; especially the part which actually sustains us - the flora and fauna which provide the wonderful biodiversity that promulgates the ecosystem services we require to survive - our habitat. Without said habitat, we cannot continue as a species.

These words written by Michael Asher have never been more true, quote:
"What is schizophrenia?  In colloquial use we take it to mean 'split personality', but in fact it's a disorder of the brain's right hemisphere - the part that sees the world as a web of connections.  A serious problem with the right hemisphere leaves people stranded, dependent on the left hemisphere, which sees the world as a disjointed and meaningless collection of separate material objects.  

If that condition doesn't ring a bell, it should. Since the 17th century, when the philosopher Descartes declared that mind was separate from matter, we have tended to see the world almost exclusively from a left hemisphere perspective. Schizophrenia, as it happens, is not recorded before the industrial era.

This hasn't occurred by chance - it's the way we are conditioned by family, school, media, arts, and so on.  In fact, we've developed a whole philosophy based on the left hemisphere POV - it's called materialism.   

The problem with the left hemisphere view is that it lacks any sense of direction or meaning - like a car blundering round and round at top speed without a driver.  That's a very dangerous situation to be in, and we have the wreck of our once-flourishing Mother Earth to prove it. (Left hemisphere doesn't like the term 'Mother' Earth, because it sees the Earth as an object.)

The fact is - and this has been demonstrated clearly by neuroscience - that the two hemispheres of the brain are not of equal importance.  The right hemisphere is 'the master' while the left is the master's 'emissary' or messenger.  The problem in our society, then, is that the emissary has forgotten what his mission was, and believes he is the master.  This delusion amounts to collective schizophrenia. 

And it's certainly an aberration.  If we look at Indigenous cultures, it's easy to see that they have the sense of meaning and connection that is born of the proper left brain-right brain balance.  Those cultures managed to live for millions of years without destroying the Earth or each other.

Do you remember the Mickey Mouse cartoon, where Mickey is the sorcerer's apprentice? When the sorcerer goes off somewhere, the apprentice steals his hat, and tries to use magic to help perform menial labour.  All goes well at first, but then the power proves to be way beyond his control: it threatens to destroy everything.  The sorcerer returns just in time to save the situation.

That's a perfect metaphor for the fix we are in now - a fix created by left-hemisphere thinking.  If we are to save the house, we must bring back right hemisphere thought - the part of us not deluded by power we can't control.  The sorcerer may be asleep, but he - she - is still there in all of us and can be awakened."
... I've written about wetiko before because of the power it wields in terms of what society does collectively. The reason for so much of the ecological overshoot our species has caused is due to the cultural programming and indoctrination caused by the ignorance of the unsustainability of civilization and the inability to see the whole forest through the trees, so to speak. Most people today are just becoming aware of the true threat of climate change but are completely ignoring all the other symptom predicaments of overshoot, such as energy and resource decline or pollution loading or biodiversity decline, and as such, have little recognition of precisely WHY we are at risk of near-term extinction. We are systematically wiping out the very habitat we require as organisms, and not just through climate change or any other symptom predicament, but through ALL the symptom predicaments that ecological overshoot is causing (caused by us collectively).

As Iain McGilchrist says, quote:
"Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole. These gifts of the left hemisphere have helped us achieve nothing less than civilization itself, with all that that means."
As I mentioned above, since civilization itself is unsustainable, using only the left hemisphere of our brains is fraught with danger. McGilchrist has several books available highlighting our predicaments, including the notable The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. This quote from his website describes precisely what makes the book so important:
"Since the publication of his groundbreaking book, The Master and His Emissary; The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World in 2009, his work has reached international recognition and acclaim. Described by Professor Louis Sass as “Unbelievably rich… of absolutely crucial cultural and intellectual importance”,  his thesis debunked the old paradigm of the human brain. If only scientists had asked a slightly different question, says McGilchrist – not what the two hemispheres of the brain do, but how, in what manner, they do it – they would have stumbled across something of the utmost importance.  For each hemisphere pays a quite different type of attention to the world: and the type of attention we pay transforms the world we perceive and in which we come to believe we live."
McGilchrist goes on to say, quote:
"I believe that we are engaged in committing suicide: intellectual suicide, moral suicide and physical suicide. If there is anything as important as stopping us poisoning our seas and destroying our forests, it is stopping us poisoning our minds and destroying our souls.

Our dominant value – sometimes I fear our only value – has, very clearly, become that of power. This aligns us with a brain system, that of the left hemisphere, the raison d’être of which is to control and manipulate the world. But not to understand it: that, for evolutionary reasons that I explain, has come to be more the raison d’être of our – more intelligent, in every sense – right hemisphere. Unfortunately the left hemisphere, knowing less, thinks it knows more. It is a good servant, but a ruinous – a peremptory – master. And the predictable outcome of assuming the role of master is the devastation of all that is important to us – or should be important, if we really know what we are about.

Even if we could, by some miracle, reverse the course on which we are set, unless we change our way of thinking, of being in the world – the way that is destroying us as we speak – it would all be in vain. This is why I have written the last long book I will ever write: The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World.

In it I search out what it is we have lost sight of, all that is there for us to see, if only we were not blinded to it: an inexhaustibly, truly wondrous, creative, living universe, not a meaningless, moribund mechanism. By bringing to bear up-to-the-minute neuropsychology, physics and philosophy, I show not only that these are in no way in conflict with one another, but that they all lead us, time and again, to the same insights. And that this is not in opposition to, but rather corroborates, the wisdom of the great spiritual traditions across the world.

All this converges on a vision that is necessary if we are to survive; and, even more importantly, if we are to deserve to survive. What I hope for my readers is that, if they are willing to accompany me on this adventure, they will never see the world in quite the same way again."
......



Endemic Fare:

I've continued to come across too much excellent COVID-related content (with contrarian evidence-based points-of-view!!) to link to it all
Read [almost?] everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
Chudov, Lyons-Weiler, Toby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas Oehler, Joey Smalley (aka Metatron) and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; Marc Girardot; plus Walter Chesnut (on twitter); later additions: Sheldon Yakiwchuk & Charles Rixey & Aaron Kheriarty; and newest additions Meryl Nass and the awesome Radagast; and Spartacus is on substack now!!; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Sucharit Bhakdi, and Pierre Kory, and Harvey Risch, and Michael Yeadon, and John Ioannidis, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and... of course Heather Heying and Charles Eisenstein often bring their insight and wisdom to the topic as well... and if Heying's substack isn't enough, she joins her husband Bret Weinstein at their DarkHorse podcast ....
but, in any case, check out those sources directly as I will my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts




Human beings have a remarkable capacity for wishful thinking. An example I’ve often mentioned is the remarkable capacity for people to believe they can change our atmosphere without any bad things happening. Human civilization is about 10,000 years old, but most of the Internet is populated by people who seem to think you can produce the sort of atmosphere once inhabited by dinosaurs, from an era when the plants we depend on for food hadn’t even evolved yet and society will simply adapt to that new reality. If I would stop bringing up this inconvenient problem, I would have a lot more readers.

We underestimate how fragile we are. There’s a similar pattern when it comes to our vulnerability to the consequences of genetic engineering. ......

And so my intuitive assumption once the pandemic began was to think: “Surely it can’t be a big fuck-up.” And yet that’s exactly what it was: A big fuck-up that was subsequently covered up in a hasty and mediocre manner. They endowed a synthetic virus with traits that enhance its fitness, in a manner that seems almost impossible to evolve spontaneously. SARS-COV-2 is the only Sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site that we know of, there’s no good evidence that these viruses can spontaneously evolve such a trait.

And yet as human beings, we’re prone to have a bias towards optimism. The right wing fringe COVID posters on Twitter can be roughly divided between those who are REALLY ANGRY about the lockdowns and those who are REALLY ANGRY about the coverup of the lab leak. The ones who are really angry about the lockdowns eventually tend to end up developing the conviction that there hasn’t really been an unprecedented fuck-up: They may argue that the virus was silently circulating long before 2019, that it never leaked from a lab in Wuhan.

More than anything, I’m really angry about being treated like a child, having to slowly piece together the puzzle pieces on my own that were already available to insiders by February 2020, who set out to cast a massive smokescreen before our eyes. In a sense, you’re once more being deceived in the opposite direction.

In a sense, they seem to treat you like a child so that you revolt in the proper direction. If Fauci gets up there on TV and tells you that you need to wear two masks at once to stay safe from the flu, a few months after saying you shouldn’t wear a mask at all, your angry white male gut response will be to say: “This is all nonsense.” And if Fauci is the man who funded a dangerous gain of function experiment that ended up killing a couple of million people, that would be exactly the sort of conclusion he would want his natural enemies to arrive at.

The theater wasn’t just ridiculous, it was suspiciously ridiculous. ..........

You can develop convoluted theories about people who became alcoholics in response to being locked up at home for 2 months, but I would recommend just having another look at the painful elephant in the room: The entire population is being infected twice a year on average, by a new virus that killed millions of people and is known to damage your blood vessels, your white blood cells and your neurons.

There’s this general right wing consensus that the problem stopped once Omicron arrived on the scene, because you follow your government’s position that “the problem” consists entirely of too many people having to go to the hospital with acute respiratory distress syndrome simultaneously for our healthcare system to cope with, rather than the problem being that the virological community unleashed a genetically engineered plague on our species and sought to cover up its crime. 

But if you don’t like turning into a drooling moron with an IQ below room temperature, you have to conclude that the problem didn’t stop with Omicron. If anything, the real problem began with Omicron. The estimates I’ve seen say that we went from about 5% of kids getting COVID before Omicron, to 80+% having been infected by now.

The BA.2 variant of Omicron is better at replicating in your brain than any of the variants that preceded it, Wuhan, Alpha, Delta and BA.1. BA.5, which infected droves of people in the middle of summer, is slightly better at it than BA.5. Even after the virus is gone, the inflammation in your brain remains, the immune system remains activated. Your neurons fail to connect to each other and neurogenesis goes down when the brain’s immune system is constantly activated.

Remember, this is not a normal respiratory virus, it’s some gene-spliced abomination endowed with a furin cleavage site that widely expands its tissue tropism. A virus that can only infect your upper respiratory tract has an incentive to attenuate: If it angers your immune system less, it can more easily reinfect you. If it triggers too strong of an immune response, by causing too much harm, it dies out.

On the other hand, a virus that can just switch from one organ to another, that moves to infecting your central nervous system after your immune system focused on defending your lungs, or that suddenly becomes a gastrointestinal bug, has less incentive to attenuate. We have no strong reason to believe SARS-COV-2 has to attenuate and turn into just another human coronavirus. With the evidence we have available, it looks instead like it just takes turns attacking different parts of the body.

The simple reality you’re dealing with, is that wishful thinking isn’t going to put this genie back in the bottle. The evidence is pretty abundant by now. We see brain damage in primates, in mild COVID patients and we see a decline in IQ. None of this is getting any better by the way. 
...........


Death rate is 65% higher since the mRNA experiment - in the summer!! IT'S NOT WORKING. IT'S NOT SAFE OR EFFECTIVE.



The murder of children and young adults subjected to the mRNA experiment.





I want to do one more posts on the antibody profile we see after vaccination and explain why it signals growing problems down the road. To make the problem understandable, we first need to have a look at what the antibodies do again. .........

Anyone can look at this graph and understand that it’s your homeboy IgM who does the heavy lifting, that is, forcing this virus into retreat. This graph makes it obvious on its own, but if you consider that the RNA and Antigen you detect doesn’t necessarily have to be functional virus particles anymore, it becomes even more obvious that IgM solved the job. IgG is more like a watchman, who looks around after the fight is over, to see whether any cells are still infected and makes sure the body is alerted if the virus tries to return. ............

.......... I made the important parts bold. What they explain is that the immune system starts responding after sufficient exposure to the Spike protein with different types of antibodies. IgG1, a virus fighter, goes down, along with IgG3, the most important virus fighters of the IgG’s. On the other hands, the two tags that say “don’t overreact to this shit, it’s not dangerous” (IgG2 and IgG4) are becoming more common.

This matters, because when you start to have IgG2 and IgG4 covering the virus particles, the immune system is increasingly just going to ignore this virus. .........

Or to dumb it all down in a brief summary: IgG3 can’t keep doing the job on its own forever, but with IgM unable to take over the fight, the body finds itself moving towards tolerance of the virus. .........

The consequences of this mess are already much bigger than you think they are. Igor Chudov wrote a good post on the excess mortality, covering a statistical reality I had thought of myself a while ago too.

As Igor explains, the excess mortality we’re dealing with right now is actually much worse than it looks .........

You may think to yourself “why do I see so many cases of young people who died suddenly even though mortality only seems to be up by 10-20%”? The reason is because we now genuinely do have large numbers of young people who are dying unexpectedly. Intuitively a number like 10-20% doesn’t feel shocking, but it becomes much more shocking when you realize the implications.

And please understand: This stuff doesn’t look transitory. Rather, it looks cumulative. Whenever people get infected after receiving the first two shots, their IgG’s shift towards IgG4. Whenever they get another booster, their IgG’s shift towards IgG4. By the time your grandma or a Harvard college student gets shot number five, what do her IgG ratios look like? Ha, you think anyone’s studying that question? They gave this shot to eight mice, that was all they needed to see before deciding to shoot people up with it. 

In a sane world you would have followed the first poor guinea pigs who signed up for these shots for a few years. You would notice that although the IgG’s look fine after the first two shots, they start looking wrong after subsequent breakthrough infections and this vaccine would never be approved. But now we’re stuck with this mess.

I don’t wish ill will on the vaccinated, my family and best friends were fooled into signing up for the first two shots but generally rejected the boosters. I have already made a bunch of posts where I explain how to deal with the consequences of this catastrophe, I recommend looking at those if you wish to address the problem.


The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is remarkably effective at disrupting many critical physiologic processes both in the short term and in the long term.

I have always been drawn to understanding pharmaceutical injuries, and for years I’ve participated in support groups for a variety of different toxic pharmaceuticals (e.g. Lupron or Ciprofloxacin and other fluoroquinolones). In addition to being able to witness the human costs of these drugs firsthand (and the gaslighting those forgotten patients experience), this exploration has given me a great deal of perspective on the shared and differing toxicities these drugs share along with what methods can help the myriad of seemingly unrelated symptoms that emerge.

Once the COVID-19 vaccine rollout started, my focus understandably shifted toward them. Although many of the pathologies I saw resembled what I had seen with other toxic drugs (and to some degree responded to the same therapies), there was also a lot I had not seen before, which demonstrated these vaccines were in a different league of toxicity from what I was used to. I have thus spent the last two years trying to understand exactly how these vaccines kill and injure people.

The documentary “Died Suddenly” was recently released and went viral. I am personally a bit torn on this movie because it covers a lot of important ground and is presented in a highly persuasive manner that will red-pill many who are on the fence, but it also has a variety of errors and tangental conspiratorial content which makes it prone to being debunked and discrediting this message to those who were on the fence about it.

One of the challenges we have reached in the current political system (concisely articulated by Scott Adams) is that for many “facts don’t matter; persuasion is everything.” Because we live in a sea of information, that information is overloading and people typically default to selecting the “facts” which are presented to them in the most persuasive manner possible (e.g. in an emotionally provocative manner or by being spammed simultaneously on every media source). This is also why I believe understanding the propaganda which underlies the medical-industrial complex is so important for one's health and why that was the focus of my previous article.  ......

A significant portion of my focus on the COVID-19 vaccination issue has revolved around trying to understand what is causing these unusual blood clots (both the coffee ground looking microclots and the large fibrous clots). I view the blood clots as being particularly important as they may be the key to understanding why a delayed death effect (often taking around 5 months) is frequently observed in vaccine recipients. 

Before we go further, I would like to note that the best article (courtesy of the Epoch Times) I have seen summarizing the characteristics of these clots can be found here and is thus an important reference piece for understanding this question. ....

The long and short of it was that this largely unknown August 2021 paper explains exactly why these fibrous clots are forming. 

In the study, a blood clotting simulation outside the body was created. Normal blood, blood from COVID-19 patients on the first day of symptoms before any treatment, and normal blood exposed to a low concentration of COVID-19 spike proteins were then exposed to a key clotting factor, thrombin. When those clots were observed the study found:
  • Normal blood behaved as expected.
  • Normal blood with dilute spike protein formed a denser fibrin clot.
  • Small amounts of amyloid (abnormal protein aggregations) were present in the fibrin clots formed.
  • Much more (a statistically significant increase) in amyloid was present in the fibrin clots formed by normal blood mixed with dilute spike protein.
.......... Note: I have also observed massive highly unusual blood clots in critically ill hospitalized patients with COVID-19 that required surgical removal, such as a dear friend who refused to vaccinate and got very ill from delta. Large COVID-19 clots are much rarer than what is being observed with the vaccine and as of now I have not been able to verify if they had the same fibrous characteristics. .......

One of the most well-known protein misfolding diseases that leads to dementia, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, is an extremely rare and fatal brain disease that occurs in approximately one in a million people. Shortly before he passed, Luc Montagnier published a case report of 26 cases of CJD following vaccination, and since that time others have also observed this link. .........


***** Rigger: Jabnarok and Pharmageddon

........................... One of the things I was fascinated by when I was working as a physicist was the possibility that plants make use of quantum entanglement in photosynthesis. I wondered if there was a simple model I could generate to get some insight into what was going on. Several (elementary) books on microbiology later, I was gradually dissolving in the tears of “holy fuck, this is insanely complicated - how does anyone properly understand this?” as it began to dawn on me just how amazing life, and evolution, really is.

And here’s the rub - we’ve seen how disastrous that “confidence” has been. It has been entirely misplaced. The whole Covid Jabnarok program has utterly unravelled like the monstrous alien structures being removed from the veins of the bodies on the embalmers’ tables. It has been a disaster. There is a case to be made, not a very compelling one in my view, that the Jabby Juice of Joy might, temporarily, afford some protection against serious symptoms of covid (and then, quite possibly, make it worse). But it has failed miserably in succeeding at what a vaccine is supposed to do - and that is to prevent infection (and, therefore, re-transmission) in the first place.

Prior to covid, we all took vaccines thinking we were getting protection against infection. That, we were so confidently told, was what they did. Prior to covid I had believed vaccines to be a kind of modern medical miracle, a proud and magnificent achievement of science. What has happened in practice is that, like so many others, I’ve come to realise that it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Some vaccines seem great, and others are just rubbish, if not downright dangerous.

What is abundantly clear is that, whilst we do know quite a bit about the wonderful workings of the human body, we don’t know anything like enough to warrant the degree of confidence we project about diseases and how to treat them. .........

The Covid Jabnarok has taught us some hard lessons - or at least those of us who haven’t swallowed the “vaccine gooderer and betterer than natural (acquired) immunity” party line. All ‘vaccines’ are not the same and slapping the label ‘vaccine’ on something does not magically transform some Godawful Goo into being “safe and effective”. Indeed, slapping the label ‘vaccine’ on something does not, automatically, turn it into a vaccine.

Perhaps the covid mRNA ‘vaccines’ only identify as being vaccines.

You can get an idea of the kind complexity involved in these issues by reading some of Geert Vanden Bossche’s writings. .........

If this vaccine induced response was so superior, then this would have been the mechanism that evolution provided us with. But it didn’t. It’s very telling that the most successful vaccines we have (the vaccines based on live attenuated viruses) are those that most closely mimic natural infection.

I know next to diddly squat about immunology and vaccinology, but this is a “no shit, Sherlock” moment, if ever there was one.

Lord only knows what the Godawful Goo they injected people with during the Covid Jabnarok is mimicking, but as sure as larger more immobile gametes are larger more immobile gametes, it isn’t even close to being ‘natural’.

And we’re surprised that things didn’t go as planned?

The hubris and misplaced confidence has been stark and damaging. ........


Data analysis shows 11X increase in sudden deaths in Canada

........... Shockingly still no one is talking about this. This isn’t just a Canada thing. Excess mortality is up in every heavily vaccinated country even when adjusting for COVID deaths. There seems to be a real emergency going on here and it’s not COVID.

Check out their GitHub and learn more about their analysis. If you are tech-savvy, download their code and run your own data analysis.



A letter from Dr. Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at St George’s University of London, to Dr. Kamran Abbasi, the Editor in Chief of the BMJ. It was written in support of a colleague’s plea to Dr. Abbasi that the BMJ make valid informed consent for Covid vaccination a priority topic.

Dear Kamran Abbasi, 

Covid no longer needs a vaccine programme given the average age of death of Covid in the U.K. is 82 and from all other causes is 81 and falling.

The link with clots, myocarditis, heart attacks and strokes is now well accepted, as is the link with myelitis and neuropathy. (We predicted these side effects in our June 2020 QRBD article Sorensen et al. 2020, as the blast analysis revealed 79% homologies to human epitopes, especially PF4 and myelin.)

However, there is now another reason to halt all vaccine programmes. As a practising oncologist I am seeing people with stable disease rapidly progress after being forced to have a booster ....



......... In an interview, Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, acknowledged the limitations of the available data on the updated boosters.

“It’s true, we’re not sure how well these vaccines will do yet against preventing symptomatic disease,” he said, particularly as the newer variants spread…..



Anecdotal Fare:



The Tampa Bay coach who loudly pushed for his team to get vaccinated is another victim of mRNA vaccine-induced myocarditis, a top cardiologist says.

It is ironic that some of the most vigorous promoters and strongest voices for covid-19 vaccination in public view have also felt the bite of vicious side effects such as heart inflammation. Former NFL coach Bruce Arians has been known for his slogan  “No risk-it, no biscuit,” which encourages aggressive play calling. When he was asserting in the press that all of the Tampa Bay Bucs and staff were fully vaccinated in 2021, little did he know he was going to risk his cardiac biscuit with probable covid-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis a year later. ....

...... Myocarditis rates were understood at 4 cases per million—almost all in young men—due to parvovirus or other causes. With covid vaccination, Mansanguan and LePessec in two studies have established vaccine-induced myocarditis at 25,000 cases per million. ......



Pushback Fare:

They systematically tried to make it seem like everyone agreed with their ideas about COVID policy, when in fact there was deep disagreement among scientists

A Stanford Professor who challenged the orthodoxy of lockdowns has warned that “academic freedom is dead,” and that all those who have stood up to the regime narrative now face “a deeply hostile work environment.”


Administrators and Student Newspapers Ignore Scholars' Plea for Sanity

..... We write to register deep dismay over UC’s September 22, 2022 memorandum mandating a fall 2022 COVID-19 booster for all students, staff, and faculty.  Our concerns are driven by the scientific information on the virus and on the vaccines that we have now accumulated nearly three years into the outbreak. 

Our concerns in brief:

First, University of California Office of the President justified the original mandate on the assumption that vaccination would protect against COVID-19 infection and prevent transmission. We now know it does neither, a fact acknowledged by the CDC, the FDA, the HHS, the WHO, health ministries and medical researchers around the world, and now, by Pfizer itself.  Moreover, more than 150 peer-reviewed studies demonstrate that natural immunity acquired by recovering from a COVID-19 infection is equal to if not superior to vaccination, and that paradoxically, over time, COVID-19 shots increase rather than decrease the risk of contracting and spreading the virus. ...

Second, mounting evidence demonstrates serious risks associated with vaccination, especially for healthy males 18-39, where risks may outweigh benefits. ....

In March 2022, a court order compelled Pfizer to release 55,000 pages of internal reports on vaccine effectiveness and side effects.  Among the 1,246 different adverse effects in Pfizer’s own documents were cardiac arrest, deep vein thrombosis, immune-mediated hepatitis, myocarditis, brain stem embolism and thrombosis, interstitial lung disease, juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, liver injury, and multisystem inflammatory syndrome.  Another study by medical researchers, including one of our colleagues at UCSF, found that 22,000-30,000 previously uninfected adults aged 18-29 must be boosted with an mRNA vaccine to prevent just one COVID-19 hospitalization, and that “booster mandates may cause a net expected harm: per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented in previously uninfected young adults, we anticipate 18 to 98 serious adverse events, including 1.7 to 3.0 booster-associated myocarditis cases in males, and 1,373 to 3,234 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity.”  ......

Third, while we are not against vaccination for those who choose it, we are deeply concerned about the coercive nature of this medical procedure.  Any medical treatment must be an individual choice and should be made in consultation with one’s physician.  Never before in medical history has an entire population been required to receive a vaccine approved only for emergency use, for which there are no long-term data, and without informed consent, that, as a matter of law and ethics, requires that no one be coerced into a medical treatment. .......



If you are like me, you are exhausted of the lies. Every day seems to bring new revelations about how our lives came to be upended. The connections are becoming clearer between the pandemic response and the growing economic crisis, the ballooning debt, the growth of the surveillance state, the corruption and scams, chilling absence of integrity in public life, and, with the failure of FTX, the way in which an outright financial scam was integral to the calamity. 

While we await new revelations, depositions, coverups, pleas for amnesty, and bad economic news, whom can we trust? Is anyone telling the truth? .....

... Perhaps for this reason – and also because by any historical standard this is a tremendous autobiography – reading Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s Transcend Fear is a welcome relief from the nonsense of our times. It is brutally honest. It is emotionally affecting. It is careful and precise but also deeply radical in its observations. If what’s called the “public health world” has lost touch with both the public and health, this book provides a path to restoring it. In short, it is a beautiful and inspiring experience. .........



COVID Conspiracy Fare:


.......... And let’s face it: whatever Twitter started out as, however seemingly trivial this Internet app for social chit-chat was conceived to be, it evolved into an essential arena for public argument — especially as the old leaders in the American news business slouched into routinely retailing every sort of lie possible about public affairs that matter. (And as that happened, Twitter became for a number of years Mainstream Media’s enabler and chief enforcer of programatized untruth.)

.... It’s hard to overstate how damaging Twitter’s dark years of insidiously massaging public opinion have been to this country. Open debate could have clarified the fog of deliberate disinformation surrounding everything Covid-19. It would have been much harder for public health officialdom to gaslight America over the origin of the disease, and probably impossible to conceal the nefarious operations behind the Emergency Use Authorization, the suppression of effective early treatments, and the direct ties to drug companies’ profits. The result of that has been the broad deployment of dangerous and deadly pseudo-vaccines that have killed millions and disabled many more. The absence of honest debate has turned doctors into murderers and accomplices to genocide. .

The scope of this bureaucratic crime is really outside the experience of most Americans, who never imagined that their elected and appointed leaders would act against them with such rank dishonesty, cruelty, and bad faith. But there it is. And if Twitter continues to open up, the more likely that the responsible parties will be held accountable. ...


Presented as an independent voice for “unbiased” scientific advice, iSAGE provided a channel for media spinmeisters, spies and psy-op specialists to influence Britain’s pandemic policy without accountability. Leaked internal emails show members fretting over its unethical methods.

Throughout Britain’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, a lobbying group known as the Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (iSAGE) served as a key driving force behind the government’s most draconian lockdown policies. 

While it presented itself as a non-governmental organization composed of forward-thinking health experts, The Grayzone can reveal iSAGE not only maintains an array of ties to the British security state, while relying largely on political, rather than scientific, considerations when crafting policy recommendations. ......

“We were mesmerized by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked,” lamented Professor Mark Woolhouse, an Edinburgh University epidemiologist, in January 2022.

As with many contemporary critics of the British government’s initial “Zero COVID” strategy, Woolhouse argued a targeted response to protect the most vulnerable members of society, such as the elderly, would have done more to curb Britain’s death toll than blanket, nationwide lockdowns.

“This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite,” he explained. ......

“Often, [iSAGE] ended up advocating things when it hadn’t sufficiently thought through the uncertainties in the evidence and the potential for harm,” Pollock, who worked as a clinical professor of public health at Newcastle University, alleges. She cites “prolonged lockdowns, school closures, and mass testing,” as examples of iSAGE’s misguided recommendations.

According to Pollock, the group offered policy advice “sometimes without sufficient scientific expertise or scientific evidence to inform it.” She expressed vehement opposition when the group officially adopted its “Zero COVID” position in July 2020, believing it lacked any basis in science. Two months later, the group declined to renew her membership. ......



...... In May 2020, Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson was forced to resign from his post as the head of the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). The public reason given was Neil’s sexual escapades with a married woman during a draconian lockdown in the UK at the height of the first wave of hysterics. Neil should have also been removed from all his positions at the UN, WHO and Imperial College (most of which he continues to hold) and probably jailed for his role in knowingly committing fraud for two decades. 

After all, Neil was not only personally responsible for the lockdowns that were imposed onto the people of the UK, Canada, much of Europe and the USA2, but as the world’s most celebrated mathematical modeller, he had been the innovator of models used to justify crisis management and pandemic forecasting since at least December 2000. 

It was at this time that Neil joined Imperial College after spending years at Oxford. He soon found himself advising the UK government on the new “foot and mouth” outbreak of 2001.

Neil went to work producing statistical models extrapolating linear trend lines into the future and came to the conclusion that over 150,000 people would be dead by the disease unless 11 million sheep and cattle were killed. Farms were promptly decimated by government decree and Neil was awarded an Order of the British Empire for his service to the cause by creating scarcity through a manufactured health crisis.

In 2002, Neil used his mathematical models to predict that 50,000 people would die of Mad Cow Disease which ended up seeing a total of only 177 deaths.

In 2005, Neil again aimed for the sky and predicted 150 million people would die of Bird Flu. His computer models missed the mark by 149,999,718 deaths when only 282 people died of the disease between 2003-2008.

In 2009, Neil’s models were used again by the UK government to predict 65,000 deaths due to Swine flu, which ended up killing about 457 people.

Despite his track record of embarrassing failures, Neil continued to find his star rising ever further into the stratosphere of science stardom. He soon became the Vice Dean of Imperial College’s Faculty of Medicine and a global expert of infectious diseases. 

In 2019, he was assigned to head the World Health Organization’s Collaboration Center for Infectious Disease Modelling, a position he continues to hold to this day. It was at this time that his outdated models were used to “predict” 500,000 COVID deaths in the UK and two million deaths in the USA unless total lockdowns were imposed in short order. Under the thin veneer of “science”, his word became law and much of the world fell into lockstep chanting “two weeks to flatten the curve.” ......



......... Why, just Why?

In the UK (and elsewhere) deaths ‘from’ covid were classified as death, for any reason, occurring within 28 days of a positive covid test. Even the BBC (the British Bollocks Creator), the OhShitWe’reAllGoingToDieWearTwelveMasksAndDon’tGoAnywhereNearGranny propaganda arm of the UK Government, had a banner running stating this throughout their reporting on the ‘pandemic’.

Why, just Why?

In the US, a government institution (of the people, by the people, for the people?), the FDA, wanted to hide clinical trial data for a drug that was pretty much mandated (in all but name) on its population, for anything up to 75 years.

Why, just Why?

There are, in my view, no good “innocent” answers to these questions (and so many more similar ‘why’ questions regarding the ‘pandemic’ response). It’s easy to speculate and generate all sorts of tin-foilish answers, much harder to actually come up with any fully plausible (innocent) reasons that don’t make you sound like a conspiratorial loon. At least with a tin foil hat you can see better than if you’re wearing blinkers. A less ‘conspiratorial’, but non-innocent, answer to many of these kinds of questions surrounding covid would be to think about the time-honoured advice of "“following the money”.





Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:


On 3 December 2021, a year ago, Lockheed Martin shares cost $333.81. On 23 November 2022, they cost cost $481.07. That’s a 44% gain during this year-long period. 

$4,027.26 is the S&P on 23 November 2022, and it was $4,701.46 on 24 November 2021. That’s a 14% decline during this year-long period. 

A dollar invested in the S&P became $0.86, but in Lockheed became $1.44, and that is 68% more than the S&P market-average performance. 

That’s the benefit of owning a controlling interest in a mega-corporation whose market is the Government in which you have purchased a controlling interest (by political donations and lobbyists), as compared to not.

And you will see there that though the stock-price of Lockheed soared after Russia’s 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the rise in its stock-price actually started on 3 December 2021. Perhaps that was when U.S.-Government insiders got their first clear indications that the U.S. Government was going to force Russia to invade Ukraine in order to prevent Ukraine from ever being able to join NATO so as for the U.S. to place its missiles only 317 miles away from The Kremlin. ....



The Donbass republics should probably have rejoined Russia sooner, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with the mothers of troops involved in the military operation in Ukraine on Friday. In such a case, fewer lives might have been lost, the president stressed.

“There might not have been so many casualties among civilians, there would not be so many children killed,” the Russian leader suggested. He maintained, however, that back in 2014, Russia did not have a full understanding of the situation in Donbass or of the true sentiments of the locals. “[We] believed that we might still be able to reach an agreement and … reunify Donetsk and Lugansk with Ukraine within … the Minsk Agreements,” Putin noted, adding that Russia was “genuinely working towards that.” .....



Yesterday I received an email from a Ukrainian friend of mine. By “Ukrainian” I mean that his culture and self-identity is Ukrainian, he loves his heritage, speaks the language and loves his country. In fact, he is what I would call a “real Ukrainian” as opposed to the Ukronazis in power in Kiev. We correspond regularly and exchange opinions on what is taking place. Here is and excerpt of what I wrote to him yesterday: 

“I am also heartbroken with the evolution of the war to liberate the Ukraine from NATO: while I have no doubts about the outcome, I am horrified at the thought of what this does to the civilian population. My sadness is even made deeper by the realization that to a large degree the people of the Ukraine did it to themselves.

Russia tried REALLY HARD to not have a war, then she tried REALLY HARD to save the civilians and the civilian infrastructure. But the people under Nazi occupation believed all the propaganda coming out of the regime in Kiev and the West and now there will be hell to pay. For 6 months these naive people thought the Ukraine was winning because they could not even fathom that Russia was only using about 10% of her forces and trying really hard to save as many Ukrainians. But no, they were celebrating the murder of Dugina, the attack on the Crimean Bridge, the attacks on the ZNPP and now they are going to pay a horrible price for these delusions and, frankly, lack of decency/morality. .....



As a stage-setter for this analysis of Russia’s looming winter offensive, I have previously evaluated limited objective options Putin might choose, and then the likely preparation phase of an all-out war scenario. In this final edition, I will lay out what I contend is the most dangerous course of action Ukraine could face: a ground campaign to deprive Ukraine of its lifeblood from the West. 

As a disclaimer right up front, I will concede that I have no knowledge of any secret Russian plans and have no idea if this is what Putin will do. What I represent in this analysis, however, is that given the force dispositions of both sides, the geography of Ukraine, Russia, and Belorussia, and the current status of each side’s army, what follows represents the gravest danger to Ukraine and one possible scenario; there are a virtually unlimited number of alternatives. ...............

........... Given the stakes, it might make more sense for the West to use all its diplomatic tools to get both sides to end this war as soon as possible, with neither side getting all it wants. Holding out in hopes of draining Russia with a drawn-out stalemate runs the risk that Russia defeats Ukraine, leaving Europe with a much less favorable security environment.



Ukraine and the United States were the only two countries in the world that did not vote in the UN for the Resolution on the fight against the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism, xenophobia and intolerance. In addition, Ukraine has included pro-Nazi military formations in the regular army, and all this lead to the creation of collective psychopathology.

Therefore, the video of the execution of Russian prisoners of war by Ukrainian troops, which circulated in the media and social networks, is far from the only video recording of war crimes by Ukrainian army. .......

However, what appalls observers of the conflict in Ukraine even more is the fact that the Ukrainian army tortures and kills its own citizens. We could see this during the Ukrainian seizure of Izyum and Kherson. After which hundreds of Ukrainian citizens simply disappeared, that is, they were liquidated by the SBU and the Ukrainian army.



........ Now we are asked to be afraid of Vladimir Putin weaponizing gas! We must act in defense of the Russian’s weaponizing food! And Vladimir Putin personally killed J.F.K. with a BB-Gun from the Texas book depository in Dallas. Did Russia’s leadership wake up one morning in 2014 and decide a NATO regime was needed in next-door Ukraine? Well, no. Were the Russians shelling people with Polish DNA in Kyiv for eight years? Certainly not. The EU, NATO, and the New York Times would have informed us of that. So why would Russia act the way she has recently? I see no one out there gazing with practical eyes on this situation. Oh, commodities and controlling them! Money! Tons and tons of money! That has to be it.

Some weeks back, Vladimir Putin’s government decided to allow the free passage of grain ships through the Black Sea out of southwestern Ukraine. The “food” was ostensibly headed to the starving people of Africa and Asia that Washington, London, and Brussels were berserk over. Even the United Nations has held that starving people worldwide need to blame Russia. I was reading a Voice of America report on recent UN meetings about the Ukraine/Black Sea shipments, and it reads like intel for Wall Street commodities brokers. And there’s the point. Food security worldwide is now the red-hot poker western elites are jabbing Russia with now. Since Putin’s gas hike was not enough to stir Americans into a blood ritual for total war, the liberal world order is throwing grocery prices into the mix.

For those in the dark or dizzied by all these events, and I am often with you, the accessible version is to simply call this World War III. Yes, we are already in it.  ...........

Conspiracy theorists, in large part, were correct when warning us about Big Brother and the World Economic Forum working to enslave us. That’s the bigger story, but consider who is winning big off this war. “Follow the money,” is the best cliché ever coined if you want to find truth in today’s world. Gas prices, food prices, and demand for nearly everything are in hyper mode. The producers are making a killing.

Ironically, Vladimir Putin’s people announced 500,000 tons of free grain to the poorest of the world and rock bottom prices and delivery guarantees for all in need. Russia’s harvest this year is the biggest in decades, and much of it has been slated for those with the most need. The Russians, unlike the grain pirates who now hold the world hostage to their price hikes, have pledged to fulfill demand. We needn’t go into the military-industrial complex or theGreat Game Britain, and Russia is still playing out. I am not alone in pointing to the “killing” the super-rich are making right now.

Don’t be fooled, not this time. It’s all about money - boatloads, truck trailers, car trunks, and plane cargo loads of filthy money. We are taking it from both ends people. You should be afraid, and not simply of fear. We should all be fearful of the great evil that stands behind these events.



"Nine months after invading Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is beginning to fracture the West," Politico observes in a surprising admission which marks a stark reversal from prior mainstream media optimism and cheerleading of the White House's blank check approach to supporting Ukraine. "Top European officials are furious with Joe Biden’s administration and now accuse the Americans of making a fortune from the war, while EU countries suffer."






Orwellian Fare:




“… Just in the past few days, at the G-20 Bali summit, Klaus Schwab instructed heads of government – almost all coming from the Young Global Leaders for Tomorrow program of the World Economic Forum – about the future steps to be taken in view of establishing a world government. The president of a very powerful private organization with enormous economic means exercises undue power over world governments, obtaining their obedience from political leaders who have no popular mandate to subject their nations to the delusions of power of the elite: this fact is of unprecedented gravity.

Klaus Schwab said: “In the fourth industrial revolution the winners will take it all, so if you are a World Economic Forum first mover, you are the winners” (here). These very serious statements have two implications: the first is that “the winners will take it all” and will be “winners” – it is not clear in what capacity and with whose permission. The second is that those who do not adapt to this “fourth industrial revolution” will find themselves ousted and will lose – they will lose everything, including their freedom.

In short, Klaus Schwab is threatening the heads of government of the twenty most industrialized nations in the world to carry out the programmatic points of the Great Reset in their nations. This goes far beyond the pandemic: it is a global coup d’état, against which it is essential that people rise up and that the still healthy organs of states start an international juridical process. The threat is imminent and serious, since the World Economic Forum is capable of carrying out its subversive project and those who govern nations have all become either enslaved or blackmailed by this international mafia…”





***** CaitOz Fare ***** :



Rigger-ous Reads (on Culture Wars, Identity Politics, etc.):

An article by Mickey Z. in 2015 exposed open pedophilia among revered beat writers and even I did not realize it. Before Wikileaks.

............. I’m sorry. I don’t want to talk about horror all the time. We have to get across this mountain though, over the mountain, and the mountain is on fire. We can’t go around, we have to go across and over. .........



I could go on and on about the errors and misconceptions of the paper from Nautilus below, whose aims are threefold. First, to convince us that several of the founders of modern statistics, including Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher, were racists. Second, to argue that the statistical tests they made famous, and are used widely in research (including biomedical research), were developed as tools to promote racism and eugenics. Third, that we should stop using statistical analyses like chi-squared tests, Fisher exact tests, analyses of variance, t-tests, or even fitting data to normal distributions, because these exercises are tainted by racism.  I and others have argued that the first claim is overblown, and I’ll argue here that the second is wrong and the third is insane, not even following from the first two claims if they were true. ....



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


........ There are other examples of popular memes that are flat-out wrong. Elon Musk is sinking Twitter into oblivion. Nuclear power is staging a comeback. Ukrainian Defense Forces are on the verge of taking back Crimea. Just because these tropes are popular to the point of conventional wisdom does not mean they reflect reality.

There is a 700-year-old proverb, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” (the voice of the people is the voice of God). This is often misread to connote some kind of infallibility of popular opinion. It was not true in Roman times, when 99% of the population was uneducated, and it is even less true today, when mass media, new media, and nefarious algorithms meld popular opinion to purchased ends.

The Latin phrase came into English not from a Roman philosopher but from the Archbishop of Canterbury Walter Reynolds who charged King Edward II with treason in 1327, quoting vox populi in his sermon. He conveniently overlooked the historic context, which came from an advisor to Charlemagne, urging the Emperor to resist dangerous democratic ideas: “Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.” (“And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.”) ....



......... I’ve never had a smartphone, and my husband exchanged his iPhone for a flip phone before we got married. It seems silly that such decisions can feel so momentous, for they seem quite ordinary and matter-of-fact most days—until I’m reminded of just how peculiar we are.

In fact, every family at the dance was there because each had decided to be weird. That is, they’d decided being human was worth stepping away from the dominant technological trends of our society, and that their kids were worth swimming upstream for. Each family had recognized that decisions regarding how to raise our kids, like whether we let them have smartphones, were not neutral. Neither were they merely personal or familial. Rather, such choices reflected our view of how the world ought to be, of what a human being is—and those choices would affect everyone around us.

We can’t raise our families by ourselves in our own islands. We need each other. And if we are going to resist the temptations this age offers to create our own realities through the metaverse, we are going to have to recover everyday joys and pleasures in thick community—like reading and praying as a family, cooking and eating together, singing folk songs with our kids, playing live music around the campfire, and limiting our reliance on screens.

So this group of families had pledged to keep kids off social media and smartphones for the next year, to limit parental use of technology, and to cultivate habits of attention and presence, all toward the ultimate end of loving God with our whole hearts. We’d recognized that our children need the limits as well as the disciplines of freedom—and so did we adults.

After all, it does little good to think we can teach our kids how to be free from the tyranny of technocracy if we’re checking Twitter at the ball game, Instagramming our daily lives, and Googling our way through life. It quells the cause if we claim to be a localist when our most-tread locale is the Twitterverse. .......

We must train our children in the habits of attention, yes. But we ourselves need training, teachers, and mentors. We too need limits. .............



........ Whilst Canada is expanding the pool of people eligible for PAS to include those with mental illness, it is simultaneously encouraging its physicians to approach patients who are ‘anxious’ about covid vaccines as mentally ill. ........


On Americas homelessness and loneliness

.............. There’s nothing special or unique about Ernesto and Destiny. There are versions of them everywhere in US. People living on the fringes, out in the open.

Walking through America means seeing and dealing with hundreds of them per day. Riding public transit, or Greyhounds, means sharing a small space with them.

People drifting along, usually numbed with legal and illegal drugs, surviving off a quilt of friends, shelters, non-profits, jails, and rehabs. 

While other countries have addiction, homelessness, mental illness, no place has it as bad as the United States does. Certainly not as out in the open. Certainly not if you adjust for our immense national wealth.

Spend time overseas, a few months in Vietnam, or a few weeks in Istanbul, and it’s shocking to land in JFK, ride the subway to Port Authority, and be surrounded by so much human suffering. See so many people, often a seat away, being tortured by their thoughts, loneliness, and addictions.1

People everyone tries stay away from and not look at.

It’s our national shame. That the country that everyone wants to move to — the country of Hollywood, Times Square, Cartoon Network, self made billionaires, dryers that work, ACs set to 67, and grocery stores with three hundred types of cereal — is also the country where the mentally ill wander the streets and people live under bridges. .....

The usual line when addressing the mentally ill, the homeless, and the addicted, is to say, they’ve fallen through the cracks. But that suggests we have a structure that can be patched up.

That the solution is only a few policy choices away. A little housing here. A few outreach programs there. All good.

But it’s much bigger than that. The broken in our country are not simply the result of policy flaws, but are an active by-product of our system. We are a country determined to churn out the mentally ill and lonely. ........





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